Joan Acocella: The Radical Vision of St. Francis of Assisi

Joan Acocella: The Radical Vision of St. Francis of Assisi : The New Yorker: In 1206, the year that he renounced his inheritance, two young Assisians joined him. By 1208, the group numbered twelve. The Franciscan movement had begun. In Francis’s view, property, by arousing envy and, therefore, conflict, was the one thing most destructive to peace in the world. Thus the community lived, as completely as possible, without property. To be part of the group, a man had to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, and, like Francis, sever all ties with his family. Francis’s followers dressed the way he did—dirty tunic, no shoes. Their home was a wretched little shack outside the town. When the owner decided he wanted to house his donkey there, they were kicked out. Then, in a district called the Portiuncula, they found a ruined church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, and they built wattle-and-daub cells around it. This remained their headquarters for the rest of Francis’s life.

Hagel: A New Era In Foreign Policy - Behnert

Hagel: A New Era In Foreign Policy? - The Daily Beast:
When Democrats took America into Vietnam, protesters rioted in the streets at the party’s 1968 convention. Academics like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow became such pariahs after serving in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that they could not return to their old universities. Prominent pro-war columnists like Joseph Alsop became laughingstocks. Former Vietnam hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski had to intellectually reinvent themselves to secure government jobs when the Democrats returned to power under Jimmy Carter. The Iraq-era GOP, by contrast, has constructed an intellectual cocoon so hermetically sealed that it has remained uncontaminated by the greatest foreign-policy disaster of the past 30 years. That’s partly the result of the “surge,” which allowed the Republican foreign-policy establishment to claim, in my view incorrectly, some measure of vindication. It’s partly because Iraq required no draft, and thus ordinary Americans never mobilized as dramatically to oppose it, which allowed foreign-policy elites to remain more insulated from shifts in the public mood. It’s partly because the institutions where conservative foreign-policy types work—places like The Weekly Standard, Fox News, and the American Enterprise Institute—have no natural mechanism for reconsidering their view of the world.

Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense?

Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense: Republicans wants to block him from the Pentagon because of their worries about Barack Obama’s foreign policy beliefs. - Slate Magazine:

The real question is what kind of job Obama wants his next secretary of defense to do. I have no inside knowledge on this, but judging from some of his actions and remarks on matters of national defense, Hagel seems to be the right choice. And that’s what disturbs the most outspoken Hagel-resisters.

These resisters have four main concerns. They fear that Hagel will cut the military budget. They fear that he’ll roll over if Iran builds a nuclear weapon. They fear that he’s too reluctant to use military force generally. And they fear he doesn’t much like Israel; the extremists on this point claim he’s anti-Semitic.

Let’s look at these points, one by one....

Let your security blanket slip | Books | The Guardian

Let your security blanket slip | Books | The Guardian: ....we confuse the feeling of security with the reality of reducing risk. The "security theatre" of modern airports makes us feel better, without making us more secure. Indeed, it arguably makes us less secure, swallowing up resources that might otherwise be spent on more effective measures, and making airport staff, focused on finding oversized bottles of shower gel, less alert to genuinely suspicious behaviour. "Security is both a feeling and a reality," as Schneier has put it, "and they're not the same."

But this desire for a feeling of security doesn't only lure us into irrationality when it comes to air travel: it lures us into irrationality all the time. We live, we're constantly being reminded, in highly insecure times; huge swathes of our personal lives and our politics, in response to everything from the eurozone crisis to climate change, are directed by the quest to feel secure. But those responses, all too often, are counterproductive. Afraid of physical dangers, people move to gated communities, thereby undermining community cohesion and increasing the potential for more danger.

Shift in Balance of Power for Rebels in Wartorn Syria - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Shift in Balance of Power for Rebels in Wartorn Syria - SPIEGEL ONLINE:
After a while, we reach a village where residents did not openly demonstrate against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in the past. As a result, they still have electricity today. A man opens a door, shivering as he looks out at the damp, cold landscape. "Thank God for this weather!" he says wryly. It's been raining for days, and everything seems immersed in fog and mud. But the fog is also a deterrent against aircraft and helicopters, sparing the area the usual bombardment for a few days and providing a moment of calm in the midst of the apocalypse.

Today, Syria is a devastated country. The cities have turned into battlefields, and in the places from which the Assad regime's troops and militias were forced to withdraw, its air force is now incinerating the infrastructure.

Nevertheless, after months of static conflict between unequally matched forces, during which provinces were neither lost by the regime nor gained by the rebels, the balance has suddenly shifted. Military camps, airports and cities are falling to the rebels, while demoralized and hungry Syrian army units are simply giving up. The rebels are already on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, the capital. The army is defending its last bastions in the north and east, like islands in a sea, only able to receive supplies from the air. Even the Russian government, Assad's most important ally next to Iran, is gradually abandoning the dictator. Before Christmas, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he wasn't concerned with the fate of the Assad regime.

Rape Wakes India to Its Shame - Bloomberg

Rape Wakes India to Its Shame - Bloomberg:
The immediate focus is on the six men accused of torturing a medical student so sadistically that they destroyed her internal organs. The issues of women’s rights, safety and respect have seldom been the stuff of headlines in the biggest democracy. It’s also a complicated issue prone to unhelpful generalities.

But the rape cast a spotlight on something well-known to India watchers but given little heed globally: how badly India often treats its women, how sexual harassment is tolerated and the extent to which backward attitudes must be stamped out. Misogynistic comments from a variety of officials suggesting the victim may have encouraged the attack based on her dress and mannerisms don’t help.

Antipathy toward women begins in the womb. Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion driven by a societal preference for boys make it a stark challenge for girls even to enter the world. A 2012 Unicef report found that 57 percent of Indian males aged 15 to 19 think wife beating is justified.

Dish Network, the Meanest Company in America - Businessweek

Dish Network, the Meanest Company in America - Businessweek: In a 2001 deposition, Dish’s then lead counsel estimated that the company had employed more than 100 law firms in 10 years. Dish once even sued its own lawyers, Chicago-based Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, only to end up on the wrong side of a $40 million judgment and with an admonishment from a panel on behalf of the American Arbitration Association that its conduct—which included making claims of unethical conduct against the law firm that were “patently false”—was “egregious.”

Dish’s battle with TiVo (TIVO) over patent infringement took nearly a decade to settle. A federal judge once said of three Dish lawyers that their conduct didn’t “even meet law-school student behavior,” and “presented the saddest day I have seen in my many years in court.” (The lawyers were accused of filing lengthy briefs and motions with no merit as a stall tactic—a familiar charge leveled at Dish attorneys.)

On Breaking Bad

James Meek reviews ‘Breaking Bad’ produced by Vince Gilligan � LRB 3 January 2013:
In the opening episodes of the first season, we’re cued to sympathise with Walter’s plight. Humiliated by attractive, spoiled young students who have inherited more money than he’ll ever have, forced to work part-time in a car-wash to meet his family’s bills, he learns, just as he turns fifty, that he has inoperable lung cancer. When he dies he will leave his family nothing but debts. At one point, asked by a hospital psychiatrist why he went missing for 24 hours, he explains:

My wife is seven months pregnant with a baby we didn’t intend. My 15-year-old son has cerebral palsy. I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all of my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable and within 18 months I will be dead. And you ask why I ran?

His moving speech is true in its facts, and persuades the shrink, who promises to keep his story secret, to release him from hospital. But the speech is still a lie: the actual reason Walter went missing is that he was being held prisoner in a shack in the desert by the homicidal, snakeskin-shirt-wearing meth-snorting drug dealer who was distributing his product, while the dealer’s paralysed uncle, who can only communicate by using a bell to express ‘yes’ and ‘no’, signals frantically to the dealer that Walter tried to poison him.

A House Divided

A House Divided:

On the I-P Conflict

Article Detail: So you will tell your Israeli friends, whom you love and who are beautiful and kind, of your day in Ramallah. We met the nicest guy, you will say. We were a bit worried to say my friends lived in Tel Aviv, but he didn’t care at all. Wait for the impact of this statement on your Israeli friends. Small changes, you will think. All they want, your friend will say, is for us to die. Disagree with this. Assume you are well traveled and erudite and sophisticated and very well informed. Say something like All they want is to live their lives in peace, just like you. Try not to be offended when the look on your friend’s face resembles a parent’s. You are good friends; there is room for disagreement without hurt feelings or dismissal. But you have been rebuffed. Even your smallest dose of optimism has been undone.

A court on disclosing why the US doens't have to justify killing American citizens

Quote For The Day II:
"I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that
effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as
perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible
with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their
conclusion a secret," - Judge Colleen McMahon, ruling on the Obama administration's indefensible secrecy regarding its methods of deciding when or how to assassinate a US citizen waging war on the US.

How Obama Decides Your Fate If He Thinks You're a Terrorist - A decision tree

How Obama Decides Your Fate If He Thinks You're a Terrorist - Daniel Byman & Benjamin Wittes - The Atlantic: Over the past two years, the Obama administration has begun to formalize a so-called "disposition matrix" for suspected terrorists abroad: a continuously evolving database that spells out the intelligence on targets and various strategies, including contingencies, for handling them. Although the government has not spelled out the steps involved in deciding how to treat various terrorists, a look at U.S. actions in the past makes evident a rough decision tree.

Friday Night Tykes - Youth Football Taken Really Seriously

Friday Night Tykes: Texas Monthly January 2013: “I get an email from a bystander mom saying, ‘How do we make the game safer?’ ” He chuckled. “How do you answer that?” The price football extracts is boogers and blood.

Which isn’t to say Allen is a safe haven for nose-gougers. Like his NFL counterpart, Roger Goodell, Beidleman thinks the solution isn’t to radically change football but to more closely enforce the rules already on the books. (He made the Cardinals player who took cheap shots at Joey write an essay before he could play again.) Moreover, Beidleman feels that football’s battle against modernity has to be fought on grounds other than medical ones. “Our biggest competition is social media and video games and iPhones,” he told me. Every kid in Allen—like every kid in Peoria and Seattle and Brooklyn—plays Madden. The problem with Madden is that it’s arguably more fun than real football, it’s certainly safer, and it instills a false sense of confidence. Every kid thinks he can catch 40-yard bombs like he can when he’s playing as Calvin Johnson in the video game. “Can you imagine a new kid who’s never played football lining up against Cullen Perkins?” Beidleman said. Cullen, a Hawks tackle, weighs 195 pounds.

Democracy in China

The death of a revolutionary: The song of Song | The Economist:
Song put his remaining faith in the polls. In the elections of December 1912 to early 1913 more than 10% of the Chinese population would be eligible to cast votes, an elite but still large group of 40m male taxpayers who owned some property and had a primary-school education. (Women had not won the right to vote; one suffragist slapped Song in the face for not taking up their cause.) China’s first real democratic campaign had begun.

What did this first go at democracy look like? Partisans roughed up opposing candidates and activists, carried guns near polling stations to intimidate voters, bought votes with cash, meals and prostitutes (some lamented selling too early, as prices went up closer to election day), and stuffed ballot boxes. At least one victorious candidate was falsely accused of being an opium-taker.

In a word, it looked like democracy. Some historians discount these reports as scattered abuses in a fairly clean election. In any case, Song could not be thought naive: his Nationalists were accused of the preponderance of the election shenanigans, and they won in a rout, in effect taking half the seats in the legislature.

NationalJournal.com - The GOP's Failed 'Plan O': Inside the Fiscal-Cliff Saga - Thursday, January 3, 2013

NationalJournal.com - The GOP's Failed 'Plan O': Inside the Fiscal-Cliff Saga - Thursday, January 3, 2013: Shuttling between the leaders’ offices, aides with term sheets tucked into manila envelopes delivered Reid’s counteroffer a little before 3 p.m. Saturday. A GOP counterproposal that included a one-year delay of the sequester paid for by chained CPI was delivered at 4:10 p.m. The Democrats responded less than an hour and a half later. At 7:10 p.m., McConnell sent back another offer, including chained CPI.

At that point, Reid told Republicans not to expect another offer until morning. McConnell’s staff suggested sitting down in a conference room face to face and working through the issues, and Reid’s staff declined, according to the GOP aide. The two sides remained stuck on key points, including the indexing of estate tax, the threshold of taxing the wealthy, and the best way to pay for the undoing of sequester, according to a Reid aide.

Sunday morning came and went without a new Democratic counteroffer. Then, in a Sunday afternoon phone call, Reid told McConnell he was done with the back and forth. McConnell was frustrated. With only hours left, he worried that Reid was stalling for time, slow-walking him toward the cliff in an effort to gain political leverage.

McConnell decided to phone a friend.

This is all amazing

Eighty-Six Minutes of Joe Biden Being Incredible: To the female offspring of Orrin Hatch: "You know what I tell my grand-kids? Take care of your grandfather. That's your most important job. No serious guys til you're 30."

To Claire McCaskill, on her daughters: "You gonna build a fence around the house? A lotta machine guns?"

To Joe Donnelly: "If I were a bettin' man, I woulda made a lot of money on this guy."

To Heidi Heitkamp, after being told that everyone needed to put his/her hands at his/her sides: "Spread your legs!"

To one of Tim Scott's very large brothers: "Call me if you need help on your pecs."

Good commentary on word and phrase choice

'Framing' a Story: Journalism 101: Here's the headline on a Wall Street Journal story today about changes in American patterns of electricity demand:

See if you can guess how the lead paragraph of the story ends. It begins this way:

"Americans are using more gadgets, televisions and air conditioners than ever before. But, oddly, their electricity use is barely growing, ..."

Possible choices for the rest of the paragraph are:

(a) "... reflecting hard-won efficiencies in electric-power use by industries and utilities."

(b) "... raising hopes that economic growth can coexist with reduced resource-use and greenhouse-gas emissions."

(c) "... which together with increased shale-gas production may hasten the era of 'energy independence' for the United States."

(d)"... posing a daunting challenge for the nation's utilities."

Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Sanity Proves He’s No Secret Agent of Destruction - The Daily Beast

Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Sanity Proves He’s No Secret Agent of Destruction - The Daily Beast: The fiscal-cliff crisis may have accomplished almost nothing in settling our most serious policy disputes but it should put to rest the illogical notion that the presiding chief executive somehow advances his own interests through economic devastation. For 99.4 percent of all U.S. households, the president ended up agreeing to permanent consecration of the same Bush tax cuts he formerly blamed for all the economic reverses of the last decade. He accepted only a third of the new revenue he had demanded as absolutely essential to deficit reduction as recently as a month ago. In the aftermath of the agreement, Democrats seem not only surprised at the scope of the president’s concessions to the GOP, but utterly amazed that most Republicans appear unable to assess the significance of their own gains in the negotiations.

In part, that blindness stems from the lingering fear that any perceived success for Obama involves inevitable harm to America’s prospects for prosperity, because the president yearns to crash the economy as step one of imposing a new socialist system. Abandoning this delusion will not only allow the GOP to improve its political prospects but will foster a more realistic and constructive role in governance.

Why A German Pilot Escorted An American Bomber To Safety During World War II

Why A German Pilot Escorted An American Bomber To Safety During World War II: From 1990 to 2008, Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler became like brothers. Introduced by the bond of that first powerful meeting, their friendship was cemented over the years. The two men remained close throughout the rest of their lives, dying within several months of each other in 2008.

There are so many parts of that beautiful story that could have turned out differently. In any event, Stigler probably wouldn't have shot Brown's crippled plane. He was a veteran pilot with an iron sense of right and wrong; a man who would never kick another while he's down.

But what if Stigler had been executed for his disloyalty? What if Brown had landed in Germany or hadn't made it across the North Sea? What if Stigler had stayed in Germany and never learned how to speak English? Yes, things could have been different, but that chance encounter in 1943 was destined to become a chance encounter again in 1990. But more importantly, it's proof to the rest of us that something great done now can change your life much, much later.

Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost - Daniel Levitin - The Atlantic

Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost - Daniel Levitin - The Atlantic: "It was nice of you to come. It was helpful too. It's comforting to put together the pieces of my life, to see what I've done. To know that there were kind people like you who were in it with me. Thank you."

I walked down the stairs, past the rows and rows of identical apartment buildings, back to my car. Then I sat in my car with the key in the ignition, not wanting to move. Professor Pribram felt that when we lose our memory, we lose our entire sense of self. When I saw Tom, something fundamentally Tom was still there. Some of us call it personality, or essence. Some call it the "soul." Whatever it is, the tumor that took Tom's memory had not touched it.